In response to g2 and Ethan's questions about technique: all my work is 100% digital, back to about halfway through the original BrikWars painting.

If you're noticing a quality difference between the gryphon painting and the earlier work, it's because I upgraded this year from using a Wacom Intuos2 tablet in Photoshop 7 to an Intuos3 in Photoshop CS2, and it's made a big difference to the overall color and finish quality.

I think this is the first public piece I've made using the new setup, although of course I've had plenty of time practicing on the kinds of secret stuff I do for work.

I was wondering if you are going to (or would be willing to) release a less coloured version, like you did with this one. Perhaps, if it were just the figure (and weapon?) that was full of colour, it would be less distracting as a background...otherwise, I find some icons get lost on the screen. As I think I told you in person, I really love your work - Fantastic.

100% digital?? Mike can you drop a hint of at what pixel dimension is your master copy for us noobish artist?

You don't even do pencils? It's ALL DIGITAL?? Wow.... that's impressive. I thought the comic company I worked for was something because they skipped inks and went straight to digital coloring, but you sir do one better!

Rayhawk wrote:100% digital?? Mike can you drop a hint of at what pixel dimension is your master copy for us noobish artist?

In this case what you see is what you get. 1600x1200 was the original dimensions, since this was made to be a spot illustration, 1/3 page at most, and I just bumped it up a little to fit my destop dimensions. Normally the stuff I do for print is up in the 6000x4000 range, but that takes a lot more time. My computer's pretty fancy, but even it starts to choke on on images that size when the layer count gets too high (some of my professional stuff gets up to 200 layers, because of the details we have to be able to change around easily later. Like the red/blue color switch in this one, for instance).

Recluse wrote:You don't even do pencils? It's ALL DIGITAL?? Wow.... that's impressive. I thought the comic company I worked for was something because they skipped inks and went straight to digital coloring, but you sir do one better!

Well I'm not one of these guys who can lay down nice clean pencils right off the bat, my first layouts are always sloppy as Megablocks, scribbly, mis-centered, misproportioned, you name it, I'm screwing it up. It took sheet after sheet of taped-down tracing paper to refine my pencils to anything usable for coloring, and that just took way too much time to be practical for professional work.

In Photoshop, it's just "set layer transparency 20%" and "add new layer," and I've instantly got as many tracing layers as I need. Better, I can chop and hack and distort and warp the sketch proportions all I want, and my hand doesn't get in the way of the drawing or smear graphite all over everything. The pencils were the very last thing I moved over to digital, but once I got used to it it's been nothing but great.

Here's a follow-up surprise! I fell victim to some kind of weird inspiration after seeing the gold knight in the Paris Toy Fair photos, and here's the result. (This painting's a little gorier than the gryphon one, so I thought I'd bury it at the bottom of the thread.)

This picture's a little tricky to explain, but it's designed to fold in half. Since I can't actually fold your desktop, you're just going to have to imagine that this image is printed on a folded card. On the front (left) half it's all ponies and posies, and on the back (right) half it's... well, gold and glory and those unexpected spoils of war.

A little different than my usual style of composition, but I find it makes a pretty nice desktop in its own way.